Flyboy in the Buttermilk - by Greg Tate (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Greg Tate was my first, and in some ways truest, North Star . . . Greg was the first person who validated the art that I loved and made it intellectually viable." --Questlove, from the foreword

"The velocity and volume of his exuberance, his demands, his curiosities, and, yes, his vibrant dissatisfactions pulled me to the edge of my chair." --Hanif Absurraqib, from the introduction

A reissue of Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove.

From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and culture.

Under the guise of writing about a single subject, Greg Tate's essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk branch out from his usual and explore social, pop cultural, political, and economic subjects. Taking on a wide diversity of topics--from the rise of hip-hop; the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat; the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bad Brains, and many others; to the crisis of the Black intellectual and the irony of the GOP recruiting Black Americans-- Tate writes in a brave and distinctive voice that is angry, joyous, anxious, and funny.

In every piece of this collection, Tate offers informed insight into where America is going and why.

Review Quotes

"[Tate's] language - cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip-hop - was as influential as the content of his ideas. His aesthetic, innovations and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip-hop criticism, continue to influence subsequent generations, especially writers and critics of color."
--Pulitzer Prize citation

"I stole [my roommate's copy] for a while till I got my own, which across the decades has become one of a handful of books I regularly pull off the shelf just to soak in a few paragraphs and juice the brain up into writing mode . . . With its re-humanizing sprezzatura that always unveils the power grid beneath the everyday as well as the personal stakes in the systemic, [Flyboy in the Buttermilk] is a handbook for preserving your own wild sanity under the terrordome. You should pilfer it from your best friend's bookshelf posthaste."
-Carl Wilson, Bookforum

"A new reissue of Greg Tate's 1992 essay collection hits hard with the truth, again and again . . . Tate hit as hard as the music he wrote about, and his columns were often more important than his topics . . . the beauty of Tate, especially this bag of uncut gems, is that he was not a theorist of a unified field or a strict logician--or even an underdog . . . Maybe the most distinct pleasure available here is the palpable truth that Tate was not auditioning for another job . . . [he] didn't engage with culture with that sort of rueful magazine approach, the clucks-over-the-sad-brutality-of-America-but-hey-what-an-album pellet so much writing is cubed into. Tate knew the brutality is there every time the one comes back around. He just wanted everyone to get up."
-Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns

"This new edition of Tate's essay collection . . . reminds readers how wonderful it is to have this long-out-of-print book available again, as it is one of the first and most influential books that helped to define a modern Black aesthetic . . . More than just a time capsule, the book acts as a primer for being a critic. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miles Davis, Samuel R. Delany, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Spike Lee, and Amiri Baraka are all discussed here, seen through Tate's clear, critical eye . . . [T]his reissue restores a blueprint for criticism in the 21st century. VERDICT: The cultural gravity of this book makes it an essential part of any library on Black aesthetics, music criticism, and art criticism."
-John Rodzvilla, Library Journal

"A singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life . . . His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones . . . he affected every writer I cared about and learned from -- we're all Tate's children."
--Jon Caramanica, The New York Times

"[It's] hard to explain the impact that Flyboy in the Buttermilk had on a whole generation of young writers and critics who read every page of it like scripture. It's still a clinic on literary brilliance"
--Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025

"[Tate's] best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn't have got along but did . . . What made Tate's criticism special was his ability to theorize outward from his encounters with genius and his brushes with banality--to telescope between moments of artistic inspiration and the giant structures within which those moments were produced."
--Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

"A writer who'd not only mastered the mode of writing to which I aspired, but had reinvented it, right down to the vocabulary, so that music criticism became music itself."
--Ann Powers, NPR

"To call Greg Tate one of the most important critics and essayists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in any language, would not be an exaggeration. In fact, it would not be enough."
--Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review

"He looked knowingly to our tears and offered us a salve in the massive wonder of epic sentences that captured the full scale of both our sorrow and the undying enchantment that lives on in the music."
--Daphne A. Brooks, Bookforum

"Tate taught many of us how to write and even to think--musically, improvisationally, poetically . . . Tate's cultural criticism has long served as a North Star for those championing artistic freedom, cultural complexity and Black excellence."
--Kevin Young, Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture

About the Author

Greg Tate (1957-2021) was a music and popular-culture critic and journalist whose work appeared in many publications, including The Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Wire, and Downbeat. He was the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience and the editor of Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2024 in recognition of his pioneering work. Tate, via guitar and baton, also led the conducted improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, which toured internationally.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant. He is the author of There's Always This Year, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Little Devil in America, which was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named one of the books of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.